sanctuary

Monday, April 21, 2014

Loosely translated, the word
“maskirovka” means masked warfare. It could refer to Putin's use
of local thugs, volunteers and disguised Russian Special Operations
troops in eastern Ukraine to destabilize the region, thus avoiding
the use of traditional forces crossing the border as an invading
army.

Of course, we Americans know quite
a bit about “special operations” across the globe; however, we
know a good deal less about masked warfare inside our own country,
partly because we're largely unaware of what is is but, more
importantly, the idea is not to know it's actually happening. There
are no men dressed in uniforms carrying automatic weapons and
speaking in halting English. But our own unique masked warfare has
been going on for a very long time, from the very beginning of the
republic actually.

The men the American people admire
most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest
most violently are those who try to tell them the truth

(H.L. Mencken)

It's all mine

The confirmations continue to pile
up on the expanding dung heap. Following rapidly on the heels of
Thomas Piketty's “best seller” Capital in the Twenty-First
Century (see previous article), detailing the level of American
inequality, we now have Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (see Additional Reading
below).

Getting beyond the political
science jargon and supporting data, all of which is revealing, the
report pretty much demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of the
American public has very little influence regarding the policies our
government adopts. The full report will be available in the Fall.

Freedom in capitalist society
always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics:
Freedom for slave owners

(Vladimir Lenin)

The sound of black helicopters

Special operations at its very best
are good at deliberate misdirection, pitting various groups against
one another, stirring up old fears and superstitions, manipulating
ignorance, creating new historical “facts,” which oftentimes
includes nostalgic myths about the "good old days." The final act of
the very best special operations is instilling fear in the dominant
culture, be it at the local level or even throughout a nation-state.
“My god, 'they' might take it from us.”

Picking on white America

There's something to be said for a
national upheaval, even revolution in some cases. It can clear out
the accumulated rot and fanciful misconceptions, as well as rid the
nation of a corrupt and useless status quo. But, there is also a
downside. In the U.S. in the 1930s it took a worldwide economic
Depression and an extraordinary political leader like Franklin D.
Roosevelt to create serious political, economic and social change.

In Europe the same Depression led
to Fascism and WWII.. The 1918 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, by the
1930s, had turned into a reign of terror and the leadership of the
sociopath Joseph Stalin. The world is full of similar dismal
examples.

White America has been fortunate,
in that it has not had a foreign army in its country since the
British invaded the U.S. in the War of 1812. The same certainly can
not be said of the Indian nation occupying the same territory as
European-Americans but for a longer period of time. As for
African-Americans, well, they were considered property until the
1860s and were subjected to second class citizenship until well into
the 20th century. No, the American Civil War was not about
state rights.

Louis Hartz, in his classic The
Liberal Tradition in America, said in the mid-1950s, “that instead
of recapturing our past, we have got to transcend it. As for a child
leaving adolescence, there is no going home again for America.”

Our Founding Fathers, while an
extraordinary group of men, were not gods from Mount Olympus, and
they certainly never put “democracy” on some elevated platform as
we tend to do today. They were, understandably, fearful of excessive
concentration of power. For our Founders, democracy meant preventing
“mob rule and the triumph of passion over reason to serve the
ambition of the demagogue.” They created a government which ended
up over time serving the needs of the status quo. Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a television interview during a visit
to Egypt said, “I would not look to the United States Constitution
if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”

I see in the near future a crisis
approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety
of my country.... Corporations have been enthroned and an era of
corruption in high places will follow....

(Abraham Lincoln, 1864)

Had Lincoln not been assassinated,
might the history of the United States been far different? Historians
will likely be debating this question for years to come. Regardless,
white America did not choose the high ground after Lincoln was
killed. Four million former slaves were emancipated in 1865. At the
same time some 8 million whites, largely illiterate, never owned
slaves, but ended up regarding the freed African-Americans as
competitors. The whites were easily manipulated, usually by the same
people that were in control before the Civil War. By 1874 the white
power structure had regained control and the former Confederacy
descended into a “heart of darkness.”

The death of Sitting Bull removes
one of the obstacles to civilization. He was a greasy savage, who
rarely bathed and was liable at anytime to become infected with
vermin. During the whole of his life he entertained the remarkable
delusion that he was a free-born American with some rights in the
country of his ancestors

(St. Louis Republic newspaper,
December 17, 1890)

Abraham Lincoln wanted the West
opened for all Americans after the Civil War ended and for the
average American to own some land and be a citizen and a full
participant in a democratic country. Well, once again white America
did not choose the high ground. The opening of the West became the
on-going story of genocide, violence, environmental destruction,
class warfare and corporate predation and corruption. (For an
excellent understanding of the role of the railroads in the West and
the rise of the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, read
Railroaded by Richard White.)

Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is
power

(Adam Smith)

Cow billy liberty, freedom and
farmer Bundy

Today, in 2014, mythical American
exceptionalism is all pervasive, reinforced by info-entertainers on
cable news, politicians, corporations and certainly the many
oligarchs with their own anti-democratic agenda. We Americans are
somehow special and different we are advised and, if truth be told, a
little better than all the rest. The glow, however, is wearing off
the glorious fable, rather quickly. But remember what masked warfare
is all about.

Cliven Bundy, a millionaire cattle
rancher in Nevada may be an apt metaphor for a certain delusional
albeit influential segment of America, wallowing in white entitlement
and demanding its proprietary welfare capitalism in perpetuity.

Farmer Bundy has been grazing his
cattle on “public” lands and has not paid the range fee, hardly
onerous by any rational standard, to the Bureau of Land Management in
some twenty years, which clearly begs the question: What the hell has
the BLM been doing all this time?

Part of the land that Bundy grazes
his cattle on has been reserved for the endangered desert tortoise.
The land does not belong to Cliven but is held in trust for all
Americans, thanks to the intelligence and foresight of the Republican
president Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th
century. Supposedly the fee Mr. Bundy now owes to the citizens of the
United States is approximately a million dollars.

Recently, like a tired cowboy
fable, when the BLM decided it was about time to enforce the law and
round up Bundy's cattle, this odious freeloader claimed he didn't
“recognize” the Federal government and started yapping on cue
about his freedom and liberty, which naturally brought out the
various “patriot” groups and the lunatic militia movement, who
were armed to the teeth and threatened violence against BLM
officials. This dreary “range war”story is not yet over.

A judicious hanging in Wall Street
would be a good measure with which to begin the reformation

(Ignatius Donnelly, in The
Representative, August 29, 1894)

No fairy tales to believe in
anymore

The population of the United States is over 300 million people.
The total number of eligible voters is approximately 206 million
people. The number of registered voters in the U.S. are approximately
169 million, with some 86 million registered Democrats, 55 million
registered Republicans and some 28 million falling into various
categories. Now consider one to five percent of the population.

Oligarchy, for all practical purposes, is the government we now
have in the United States. Masked warfare has been quite successful.
The obvious question is what will be done about it? Who will do it?
How many people constitute a serious movement with the discipline,
the knowledge and the ability to sweep out the accumulated rot and
toss out a corrupt and useless status quo? There will be in the near
future no national uprising, no college students successfully
confronting para-military police forces on a part-time basis, and
most definitely no “glorious” revolution. It will, however, not
be pain free.

Five percent of 86 million registered Democrats is some 4 million
people; three percent of 169 million registered voters is 5 million
people; two percent of 300 million residents of the U.S. is 6 million
people. The numbers are there.

Credit must be given where credit is due. The current Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and his majority of
reactionaries could be dressed in top hats and tails and sent back to
the late 19th century. They'd fit right in. Antonin Scalia
could ponder his doctrine of “original intent” until the cows
come home.

From voting rights to unlimited money in politics, the Roberts
court has done its duty well. It was a television comedian that said
of the Chief Justice that he was either a liar or too naïve to be
serving on the highest court in the land, if he believed that large
sums of money did not corrupt the political system.

The U.S. Congress, a corrupt, pompous debating society for
millionaires, is merely irrelevant. The Executive branch—who knows?
Certainly having a political system allowing for a wider pool of
talent to run for the presidency would be a good beginning.

Our 18th century Constitution, a remarkable document
for its time, is now a relic of a distant past and needs to be
rewritten for the 21st century.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Thomas Piketty, the French economist,
with the publication of Capital in the Twenty-first Century has
seemingly stirred up the sleepy and bloodless world of modern
economic theory and its bland, oftentimes, pseudo-scientific
gibberish. Yes, inequality cannot be understood independently of
politics. Some of those 19th century economists, like
Karl Marx and David Ricardo, did have some extremely important
insights about how the world actually works—then and now.

In regard to income created by work,
inequality (the level of inequality) in the U.S., according to
Piketty, is “probably higher than in any other society at any time
in the past, anywhere in the world.”

The Jones Plantation

Mind of the sociopath

Martijn van den Heuvel of the
University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands recently
announced that they have completed the first detailed map of any
mammal's neural network. It's called the Allen Mouse Brain
Connectivity Atlas.

While a similar mapping of the human
brain is still many years away, this is a first step in understanding
medical conditions such as bi-polar disorders, schizophrenia and
autism. It is about connections and the complexity of brain
connectivity. Now, if we are able in the not too distant future, to
understand human predation and how to make the necessary adjustments
to those neural networks, we could possibly look forward to a future
where humankind might make a positive contribution to our planet's
well being.

Of course, economic theory and
neuroscience aside, how do you actually go about—in this day and
age—of bringing the existing structure to an end and rebuilding
anew? Possibly remembering some old ideas.

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About Me

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountains." (Aldo Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain")
"We are the rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it." (Frederick Townsend Martin, 19th century plutocrat)